


The Mad Priest of the Sun

by Selden



Category: 16th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF
Genre: Gen, Memory Palace Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-09 00:02:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4325964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/pseuds/Selden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kit Marlowe tries out Giordano Bruno's most excellent and intricate art of memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mad Priest of the Sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gemothy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gemothy/gifts).



"You are called to dinner with the sun, Kit," says Thomas Kyd, propping himself up on one elbow in their narrow bed. "Come, I will draw you out a map. You must choose circles, not squares, and you must mark the way with figures of the virtues." He takes out a pen and begins to write on Kit's bare chest in his neat scrivener's hand. Afternoon light the colour of blanched almonds comes through the casement and shines on the curve of his shoulder. His skin is glassy with bruises.

"Virtues, Tom?" says Kit. "That sounds like a tedious sort of business."

"The world is already full of your vices, sweet Kit," says Tom, writing. He is marking out a set of circles on Kit's chest, each within the other, like the heavenly spheres or a kind of theatre. There is something wrong with his nails; they are black and cracked like old floor-tiles, oozing some foul-smelling stuff. His pen scratches gently on Kit's skin, a little pain that is almost pleasure. "You should know, Kit," he says, almost absently, bent on his work, "that I have said some things."

"About my firm leg, my sparkling eye, and my most excellent wit, I hope," says Kit. "Come, Tom. What is all this tragifying? Thou art not angry, still, about my tumble with that scribbler?"

"Your cruel heart snaps at your teeth still, Kit," says Tom. "I said some things about your papers. About your religion."

Kit tuts; kicks, sulky, at the bedsheets.  "Men say many things, when they are put to it," he says. "And if they do not, our masters will find them anyway, if they so desire."

Tom shakes his head and draws in the sign of Saturn above Kit's right nipple. "Almost done," he says. "Kit, your messenger tarries."

Sure enough, there is a man by the door all done up like a friar, hood and beads and all.

"One Master Morley, to dine with the sun," says the friar. He has a terrible accent; he is in truth not even speaking English. "It is time to go, Kit, down to the river."

 

Kit rolls out of bed and into a tavern.

"Drink up!" bellows Ned Alleyn, raising his cup. "Drink up, my whoreson knaves, and be resolved!"

"For making piss from beer is man's great work indeed," agrees affable Jack Harington, his silk sleeve trailing in a dish of chicken bones. He holds up his cup of small beer and gives it a dose of his Englished Ariosto, hand on heart.

" _Faire mistresse who for me to heau'n shall fly,_  
_To bring again from thence my wandring wit_."

The close air of the tavern, rich with sweat and tallow, fills with groans. Jack clutches sadly at his privates. "I must go bless with sweet rains the gentle earth, good fellows," he says, elbowing past Kit to the door. "Drink up, brave lads, for night is coming down," he calls back. "Drink up, sweet lads, to moons and waxen wings!"

"To being crowned at last with the immortal bays!" cries Tom Kyd, honest and pink with drink.

In a corner, Will the glover's son has his hand in a wench's placket, her skirts over his lap. He lifts his cup over her shoulder, smiling sharp and sudden at Kit. "For words remain, kind Kit, when stone and blood are gone," he says. The girl sets a buss on his wry mouth like a notary's seal.

Kit rolls his eyes. "Allegorising does not become you, Will," he says.

Will smiles wider and gives him the fig. For old times sake, perhaps.

"Something for you to pay the boatman with, Master Marley," says little Tom Nashe through his mouthful of snaggle-teeth. He holds up a shining French coin. "A sol for you, good sir," he says, grinning. "Enough to keep you in stockfish."

The coin is warm as wax. Under his clothes, Kit feels ink crackle on his skin, almost dry. Someone has thrust a cup of beer into his hand; he knocks it back.

"Your English beer is goat-piss," says the friar. "Wine is the only god-drink!" His holy robes are too big for him and trail on the floor, wicking up evil-smelling wetness. Where they gape at the neck, his true clothes show: a doublet with missing buttons, shiny with wear. "Come, Master Christopher," he says, "we have a boat to catch."

 

They come out onto the Strand. It is evening, the air reddish and busy with smoke and dust, quick with the coming summer. Crowds rush past them towards Charing Cross, faces sweating.

Kit rubs his face. "I am due at the widow Bull's house," he says. "I remember. What game is this, master Bruno?"

Bruno smiles up at him from under his cowl, eyes a-buzz with rank divinity, religion given the delicious spice of rot. Good Bruno would never say it thus, of course: he is returning to a purer well, to Hermes Trismegistus, old as Moses and a finer kind of juggler, one could say, by far – for he finds god crammed all throughout the world, rather than locked within a golden box. In any case, it is well known (for the man himself will tell any who will listen, in Italian or Latin or very foul French) that Giordano Bruno, magus of Naples, of Paris, of the French embassy in London, has if nothing else made his own head into a kind of temple stocked with worn-out gods. A kind of cosmos too; a memory map, strung round with planets as with fizzing firecrackers that run on wires above the stage. Kit smiles despite himself. He has made much of Bruno, has sent him in some small part up among the clouds and down to hell. He has made Ned Alleyn play his wax-winged aspirations out on stage, dressed all in scholar's black before the groundlings at the Rose, pricking his finger for the witty devil.

Signed, sealed and delivered: Faustus has always drawn the crowds. Who does not love a great man's fall? Who does not shiver at the infernal friar; the name written in blood?

He has, Kit thinks, a deal more left to write.

They push against the current of the crowd, making for the river. Down Butcher street; the channel in the middle running red.

“You left England some years ago,” says Kit slowly. “I remember that, too.”

The people press on against them, every grey face turned down. Above them, sunset streams and wavers in the London sky.

“And so you should remember, queen’s intelligencer,”says Bruno. “Did I not take great pains, once, to teach you how?”

“You know as well as I that I had no stomach for your diagams,” says Kit. “I care that the sun shines, not where and how it runs in the high spheres.”

Bruno sighs and spits into the gutter. “My father prays for it every spring to come and ripen his melons,” he says. “One week of rain in April and they rot on the branch.”

“Rain makes good work for cobblers,” says Kit. “Though my father’s hands, I’ve heard, are growing cramped. Curved in like claws, they say, like a devil in a church window.”

They shove their way down to where the street licks the river with a wooden tongue of a landing stage. The tide is in.

“Our poor fathers,” says Bruno, maudlin, looking down through the planks at dark water. “Would that they had it in them to comprehend our greatness, eh? But as it is they see as if a corner of a picture; a man’s foot, a length of painted hem.”

“I suppose I must have spoken to you in my cups,” says Kit. They stand, side by side, two naughty poor men's sons, and look out on an empty river.

 

"Oars," Bruno cries lustily. "Oars, oars!"

The river, fatted and brackish, keeps its coucil.

"Oars!" cries Kit.

A boat comes at his call; a gaudy thing with a prow like a paring of fingernail.

 

At the oars is a comely young thing in a wreath and a bed-sheet. "Ganymede at your service, Master Merlin," he says, throwing out a saucy wink.

Bruno winks back and makes a dirty gesture. "Your tastes remain predictable, English Kit,” he says. “He looks a little like that sad man in the chamber.”

Kit scratches at his chest; the tight-knit ink is smearing with sweat, coming through his shirt in ugly blots. “I don’t think poor Tom will be coming for me any time soon,” he says. “Tis clear they use him cruelly.”

Bruno clicks his tongue and cracks his knuckles, thinking perhaps of a certain prison cell in Rome. “ _Comfort me with apples_ , is it, Kit?” he says. “ _Stay me with flagons_. Now we are come to the water, Kit, you must remember.”

Kit wipes at his face; there is wetness there, coming from his eye. "That whoreson Frazer," he says slowly. "Stuck me like a pig. I do remember now." He tosses his coin to the Ganymede: a tiny sun spinning through the grey night air. "How could I forget?"

"Of course you do, you English sluggard," cries Bruno, relieved. Claps him on the back. "For did I not instruct you in the most noble art of memory, in all the ciphers man could devise, in the great soul that animates the world, and all the stars and other heavenly bodies besides?"

"Every Egyptian onion," says Kit, "fat with divinity." He looks around at the dark wharf. The air is heavy with the sour breath of the Thames. "They arrested you in Venice, Master Bruno," he says. "Last year, I believe."

The friar claps him on the back. "Price of greatness, Christopher," he says, "price of greatness. We are surrounded by prating fools."

"Poking, pricking, stabbing fools," Kit murmurs bitterly. He pats at his face again; it is wet still. He turns his hand this way and that, looking at the stain.

 

There is a hole in his brow, above his left eye, where the dagger went in. He looks fit for a papist altarpiece; a sad man slubbered all with blood. Clad with the sun, holding a pen and a dagger. Doublet unlaced, to suggest wantonness. Perhaps, even now, he is naught but one of Bruno's figures, painted in the wide rooms of his scrubby little skull, as all around him prison closes up its claw.

"Come, Master Marlowe," says Bruno, kindly. "Get in the boat."

"To go I know not whither, I suppose," says Kit. This is the time when he would run, in the ordinary course of things, jagging and jigging through streets, sweet-talking his way into courtyards, bending absorbed in a pamplet, head down. Nothing to see here. But the street behind him is empty and cold, the grey people rushed all quite away, and so he knows now is the city. It is only a kind of memory theatre, drawn out in cheap ink.

He shrugs and steps into the boat.

"Come, Kit," says master Bruno. "We may share a pipe, at the least, before we must go our separate ways." He snaps his fingers, smart as a street-juggler, and produces a stubby clay pipe. "We will talk of onions and of angels, while we may."

Kit lifts his wet red face and makes a kind of smile. "Of boys and constellations," he says, "hearts of men and suns." He snaps his own fingers, and sure as a stage firecracker, the bowl of the pipe lights up.

Ganymede casts off and sets to rowing, oars stirring up the smell of river.

"You're a quick learner, Kit," says Bruno, handing him the pipe. "You will go far, my boy. For every particle of this wide world is great with God."

"As your Trismegistus would have it," Kit says, "I'll go everywhere." He draws on his pipe. "Though nowhere's shores, I think, will do for me."

  
The boat recedes. Soon there is nothing on the water but tobacco smoke, dissolving quickly into wet air dark as ink.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Belated notes! This is set on the 30th of May 1593, when Marlowe was some hours dead, his fellow playwright and ex-roommate Thomas Kyd imprisoned on suspicion of heresy, and famed philosopher, magus, and noted weirdo Giordano Bruno imprisoned likewise in Rome, for similar reason but with [considerably](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno#Imprisonment.2C_trial_and_execution.2C_1593.E2.80.931600) more cause.
> 
> The walk Kit and Giordano take through London is very (very!) loosely based on one of several framing devices used in Bruno's 1584 _Cena de le ceneri_ , or 'Ash Wednesday Supper', published during his stay in England in 1584. The _Cena_ is mostly a swinging attack on the Oxford doctors who, failing to appreciate Bruno's hermetic version of Copernican heliocentric theory, snubbed him terribly when he gave a lecture there. The idea that the journey through London is 'something in the nature of an occult memory system' belongs to Frances Yates, whose 1966 _The Art of Memory_ transformed the study of Western mnemonic traditions. Most online versions of the _Cena_ seem to cut this part out in order to cut to the philosophical chase, which is very sad, but if you c+f 'gondolieri'(!) in this [pdf](http://www.letteraturaitaliana.net/pdf/Volume_5/t109.pdf), you can see Giordano and friends calling their boatman: 'chiamando oares'!
> 
> The verse Giordano quotes (here and in fact elsewhere, in his RL work, to describe a kind of ecstatic, mystical petit-mort) is from the Song of Solomon, 2:5 KJV:
> 
>  
> 
> _Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love._


End file.
